Charlie Brooker Says There May Never Be Another 'Wipe'

The show that made Brooker a name before 'Black Mirror' hasn't been on British screens for a few years now.

He may now be the toast of the television world after taking his brilliant dystopian anthology series ‘Black Mirror’ to Netflix, but Charlie Brooker initially rose to fame with his satirical ‘Wipe’ show on the BBC.

Since 2006, the series made an appearance in a number of guises, including ‘Weekly Wipe’, ‘Screenwipe’, ‘Newswipe’, the annual ‘201X Wipe’ and the one-off ‘Gameswipe’. It gave us the brilliant characters of Philomena Cunk and Barry Sh**peas, and brilliantly satirised the news and other cultural phenomena.

However, fans of Brooker were upset last year when it was revealed that there wouldn’t be an end-of-year ‘2017 Wipe’ – and, really, that 12 months really did need one! Now, Brooker has revealed that there may not be another one ever again.

Charlie Brooker has said there may be no more 'Wipe'

“In terms of like Wipe shows, Black Mirror takes up every spare moment that I have so at the moment it's quite tricky,” the scriptwriter told the Radio Times on Thursday (November 1st). “Who knows? I wouldn't necessarily rule out an ‘End of Decade Wipe’ or something like that. Or an ‘End of the World Wipe’. That might be coming up soon.”

Last week, Brooker revealed in the new ‘Black Mirror’ companion book, how his relationship with Channel 4 broke down, which led to him moving the series to Netflix for its third and fourth seasons.

“Channel 4 said they wanted to make more ‘Black Mirror’,” he said. “We agreed to do four more episodes, but this time they wanted to see detailed synopses of each film in advance, which I thought was outrageous at the time.”

When they received feedback for their new ideas for the third season, Brooker and fellow showrunner Annabel Jones were told that they 'weren't very ‘Black Mirror’', and that the budget would be cut.

Jones said: “Given the show had won lots of awards and had been really positively received on the whole, it was strange. I think there wasn't any clarity from the channel. We also felt unchampioned.”